Aftersun

  Like the very best art, writer/director Charlotte Wells’s film MUST be seen more than once to be appreciated, fully felt and understood. Like the fragmented family it depicts, the film requires of its viewer connection, engagement, commitment.

For example, on first viewing one wouldn’t know the dark-haired woman dancing is the adult Sophie, whose memories of a holiday with her father 22 years earlier make up the narrative. That dance montage recurs several times and at the end. On the last night of the Turkish holiday young Sophie declines her dad Colum’s invitation to dance, but we see her adult version dancing and then the girl herself. Charactreristically, even when he’s dancing with them he is dancing alone.

The ending winds back to the beginning too. The film opens with Sophie filming a playful interview with her father two days after his birthday. That scene repeats later. At their airport parting Colum films young Sophie’s playful ducking, posing and wide-grinned wave. A still of that grin freezes as a wall blow-up, from which Wells pans through the adult Sophie’s flat, showing the pensive woman on her own birthday. That pan continues back to our (and Sophie’s) last view of Colum, pausing his camera, walking back, down a hall and disappearing behind distant doors. The last-shot doors define hie absence.

Like that last long pan through three sets, the film constantly plays with time. Instead of a throughway narrative we get the discontinuity of experiences remembered, shuffled, re-examined. The memory muddle explains the frequent asynchronicity, where the sound and image are at odds. We hear Colum on the phone in one position while we see him in quite another, tucking Sophie into bed. Sometimes he wears his cast, sometimes he doesn’t.

The key ambiguity is the shot of Colum walking fully-dressed into the night sea. It’s an explicit suicide out of A Star is Born. In the next scene he’s back in the hotel room. In a linear ploy he would have returned from the shore. But in a narrative that makes jumble and uncertainty its key principle that scene suggests his suicide. Not within that narrative period, but at some point, leaving adult Sophie searching her memories to deal with it.

The film’s central irony is that in this rare extended visit the young girl proves to have the poise, character and maturity of an adult, while her father reveals the weak, troubled helplessness of a child. Frankie Corio’s performance as Sophie is miraculous. Her every look suggests a profound complexity of feeling. Freeze a frame and read. When she’s locked out of their hotel room Sophie coolly sleeps in the lobby, then tries to assuage Colum’s guilt for having abandoned her. Covering her father’s naked body on her bed, she’s the adult tucking in the kid.

Sophie is unruffled by overhearing two young girls discussing their sexual activity, the sexual play of the teens she meets over a pool game, the teens’ later heavy drinking, even her spotting two gay men kissing in a doorway. The latter may shade Colum’s “new thing going with Keith.” Matter-of-factly, she tells Colum of her having kissed young Michael. 

When Colum tells her that as she grows up she should feel free to tell him anything, the shot has them on a small float in the distance, against a wide expanse of water, hills in the background. The scale conveys the futility of Colum’s promise, his helplessness to support her.

In an early shot we hear Sophie’s steady breathing, asleep in the foreground, while on the balcony behind Colum labours through tai chi exercises — while smoking! The deeply troubled Colum is reading about meditation and tai chi. He’s at loose ends, between girlfriends and jobs. Through Sophie’s description of her fatigue the camera shifts to show his face registering a far more profound exhaustion.

        Colum is impatient with her interviewing him about his childhood. He won't think of what at her 11 he thought he might become. His family forgot his 11th birthday. When he reminded her, his mother grabbed him by the ear(!) and forced his father to take him to choose a toy.

If he's broken he's also close to broke. Just before we see Sophie gifted an All-Inclusive resort bracelet, Colum picks up a cigarette butt to smoke. He overreacts to Sophie’s loss of a swimming mask. He complains that the hotel room provides less than he paid for. He and Sophie skip out on a restaurant bill. In a rare impatience she asks him why he keeps promising things (i.e., singing lessons) that he knows he can’t afford. His purchase of an expensive carpet seems to deny that — but he buys it in a spirit of gloom, not joy. We’re glad to see it in the adult Sophie’s flat. It embodies her earlier pleasure that wherever they may be, father and daughter are under the same sky. Even if no longer.

Over Colum’s unseen heavy breathing we see the adult Sophie rise from bed, then assure her woman partner that she’ll tend to their crying baby son. A blurry montage of Colum leads to his wakeup call for the day trip that will celebrate his birthday. Young Sophie enlists the tourist strangers to serenade him. Cut from that “jolly good fellow” to Colum sobbing helplessly, naked, alone in a dark room.  

At their last supper Colum pays for a polaroid snap of them together. While Sophie wistfully wishes they could stay at the resort forever we watch the photo slowly developing, firming up to a ghostly clarity. It's a miniature of the slowly revealing montages we have been absorbing.

And so to the title. My (wise) wife Anne suggests Aftersun sounds like a catchy name for a sunguard lotion, something to treat burns. We see Colum applying protective balm to Sophie a few times. Her cascade of memories are an attempt to salve his emotional sear. Aftersun also seems an inflection of Afternoon, the halfway division of the day so by extension a pivotal point in Sophie’s complicated experience of her dad.